This standalone book walks the reader episodically through the history of man from a proto-mammal surviving the K-Pg mass extinction event 65 million years ago, through the evolution of primates, to the modern day where mankind dooms itself, and then through the future in increasingly depressing steps while our decendents are farmed like cattle to the far far distant end of life on Earth.

"Evolution" is a great cautionary tale but the finale where our descendents and the planet are literally unrecognizable is depressing and continues to haunt my immortal imagination.

You don't mention which grades she is teaching. Is it possible that she is teaching the wrong age group for her style of teaching? You mention "disrespectful criminals" which makes me think of inner city middle school. Perhaps a change of venue would be more satisfying than abandoning her dream. Our schools *need* teachers with a love of math. Please don't give up.

My experience is that hotel/internet-cafe access is too slow and/or flaky and/or expensive for the purpose you describe. Pay-as-you-go HSPA cell access is very expensive (in Europe and even more-so in North America). I guess if you're only taking 300 small jpegs per day, you might be able to afford the Internet access charges but my experience, even in Europe, is that your best bet is to make your own local backups as you go. My strategy is to travel with a small netbook and a USB drive. Each evening, I offload my SD cards onto both devices and then keep the netbook in the hotel safe or car and the USB drive with my camera. For example, I just returned from two weeks in Tuscany and am currently importing 34GB of photos into a new Lightroom catalog. There's no way that I could have transferred that data over the Internet while on the road without wasting a lot of valuable travel time. Heck, it's taking 20 minutes just to copy the photos off the USB drive at 30MB/s! How much time can you spend drinking espresso waiting for uploads?

In many industries such as telecom, targets have moved from proprietary operating systems (such as VxWorks) to embedded Linux. When your target is Linux, there are obvious advantages to having a Linux-based development environment, especially around emulation tools. While some (okay, most) employers might still use Windows for the office side of the business, it is often possible, especially in R&D, to relegate the Windows world to a VM on your Linux development box. Good luck in your hunt.

Facebook is full of underage users and lets them "go legit" when they turn 13. As a consequence, they've captured this audience and all of the adults that they'll grow into (as well as a goodly number of their parents). Google+ requires that users be eighteen. That's ridiculous. Ostensibly, it is temporary but I've seen no suggestion from Google that this is any sort of priority. This is why Google+ will never challenge Facebook. When Amazon and Facebook merge, they'll rule the world. How very unfortunate.

This will be interesting for food images. Photographs of real food are invariably unappetizing; we're hard-wired to recognize food that is just a little bit off. Professional food images are invariably made attractive through the use of some pretty unappetizing material, some of it not even edible.

Imagine all the extra excuses insurance companies could fabricate once you let them milk even more of your personal information. Will governments ever have an incentive to protect our personal information? Until they do, I expect the commercialization of personal information will continue - to the detriment of the consumer. When are people going to realize that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, online or otherwise?

I don't care if a visitor let's the world know that he is at or near my house. What I object to is applications tracking *my* movements.

Mobile devices typically allow users to turn this off. On my Android Xperia X10, it's under "Location and Security Settings" and has separate flags for GPS & wireless networks.

You put too much faith in hotel staff and even hotel safes.

No, I do not put too much faith in the hotel staff; that's why I include one of my backup disks *with* my camera bag.

The simple fact is that if I had to carry my laptop in addition to all my camera gear when I'm hiking up a mountain side, I simply wouldn't be able to cover as much ground. I'm not a professional so I can't afford a sherpa to help carry all the gear.

I'm prepared to lose my laptop. I'm not prepared to lose my photos.

Honestly, I can't see the argument for a single bag. I travel with similar equipment and the last thing I want to do is add the weight of a laptop when I'm out photographing. The laptop stays in the hotel or car. What I do carry with the camera is a small USB drive which holds one of my three backups (in case my laptop is stolen.)

Keep in mind that the laptop requires a power adaptor and, internationally, a plug adaptor. If you're like me, you might even include a mouse and other USB cables to charge phones and MP3 players. In other words, you might as well have a dedicated bag.

For bag advice, I strongly recommend that you go to a dedicated site such as dpreview. I've received excellent advice for people there.

Regards,
Keith

What a defective line of reasoning. If he wants people to embrance Firefox at home, his best approach is to make it usable at their office. Those who can't use Firefox at work are going to be much less inclined to use it at home.

I'm unimpressed and disappointed. I've expended great energy over the years encouraging our business to make as many of its damn web applications support Mozilla. It's been a frustrating task but I've been happy to see a general recognition from IT and management that Firefox is a useful office application.

He's utterly wrong and misguided.

although it should give SkyNet a run for its money.

Sorry Duke, Life was a blast back in the day. But, well, you see Duke, while you were in rehab, I got married and settled down. I've got three teenage daughters now and, well.... don't get me wrong - you'll always be a friend Duke - but my wife,see, she won't take kindly if you show up. I afraid I won't be able to play with you anymore. Good luck Duke.

There is a big difference between plagarizing another students work and working on assignments together. In fact, in some of my courses, the work was explicitly team work. If you've ever been a grad student, then you must have also marked undergrad labs for your advisor. In this case, you must also remember that it's bleedin' obvious when two students collude. If the assignments were sufficiently identical, the grade was split between the students - very effective. Since you need to work together in a professional environment, it's only fitting that school help prepare you for cooperative assignments.

The accepted wisdom when I was in school was that the biology students were less collegial because they were all competing against each other to get into medicine. I don't know if there is any truth to this but, if they weren't working cooperatively with their peers (as we did in Engineeering & Computer Science), then I can imagine that this would lead to a more miserable school experience.